Dangerous Prototypes’ Hacker Camp SZ, 2nd Edition

August 13th, 2014

My buddies at Dangerous Prototypes are hosting another Shenzhen hacker camp at the end of September. If you missed the last hacker camp or are just curious about Shenzhen, check it out — the slots are filling up fast!

Come to the world’s electronics capital and experience Shenzhen like a local hacker. Tour the famous Huaqiangbei electronics markets with people who live in the neighborhood, figure out what to eat and how to get around, and of course – learn how to reball BGA chips from a soldering master with noth’n but hand tools.

  • Optional: Tuesday 23 – early arrival dinner at Japanese Secret Location
  • Optional: Wednesday 24 – tour of Dongmen market & sign street, copy mall
  • Thursday 25 – talks: how to survive Shenzhen, Huaqianbei tour
  • Friday 26 – talks: how to use Shenzhen to the fullest, BGA reballing day 1
  • Saturday 27 – BGA reballing day 2, hacker BBQ
  • That’s just an overview. See the full Hacker Camp Shenzhen schedule here. You can expect nightly dinners and parties all week. If you want to come really early, we’re hacking Phuket from the 15th to the 19th.

    Introducing lowRISC

    August 5th, 2014

    There’s a new, open-to-the-RTL CPU project called lowRISC.

    lowRISC is producing fully open hardware systems. From the processor core to the development board, our goal is to create a completely open computing eco-system.

    Our open-source SoC (System-on-a-Chip) designs will be based on the 64-bit RISC-V instruction set architecture. Volume silicon manufacture is planned as is a low-cost development board.

    lowRISC is a not-for-profit organisation working closely with the University of Cambridge and the open-source community.

    This is a positive development for the open source hardware community and I’m excited and honored to be included on their technical advisory board. Can’t wait to play with it!

    Name that Ware July 2014

    July 30th, 2014

    The Ware for July 2014 is shown below.

    Sorry that posts and updates have been infrequent the past few months — been really busy!

    Winner, Name that Ware June 2014

    July 30th, 2014

    The Ware for June 2014 is a Lantronix SLC RS232 I/O server. I’ll declare Jacob Creedon as the winner for being very close with his first response and providing some in-depth analysis to back up his guesses! Congrats, email me for your prize.

    Name that Ware June 2014

    June 27th, 2014

    The Ware for June 2014 is shown below.

    This is a reader-submitted ware, but the submitter requested to remain anonymous. Thanks, though, you know who you are!